For more than three decades, researchers studying genomes have relied on foundational resources such as Repbase and, more ...

Deep within tropical forests, sloths move at a pace that seems almost frozen in time. Their slow movements, low energy use, ...

DNA carries the instructions for life, but additional molecular systems help determine how those instructions are used. New ...

Researchers have created a new way to reconstruct the evolutionary history of complex plant genomes by analyzing genetic traces left by transposable elements. The technique revealed that modern ...

Polar bear subpopulations across the Arctic are losing genetic diversity and showing divergent gene activity as sea ice ...

Heat waves often feel like short, intense events. A day of extreme heat passes, and life returns to normal. But new research suggests that organisms may carry a memory of that heat far beyond a single ...

Most lethal mutations in wild fruit flies are driven by newly transferred jumping genes, not small DNA errors, according to a new study from Duke University. The findings, published in PLOS Biology, ...

Arms races between parasites and hosts are key drivers of evolution. Selfishly replicating transposable elements (TEs) are thought to follow similar dynamics, but strong evidence is missing. We test ...

To understand how organisms are related, researchers use molecular information to construct phylogenetic trees. Most of the time, scientists use thousands of protein-coding sequences to determine ...

Transposable elements (TEs) are DNA sequences that can take different positions within a genome to create or reverse mutations, change genetic identity, or contribute to diseases like cancer. Poly(ADP ...

For decades, scientists regarded large portions of our DNA as genetic junk – useless remnants of ancient viruses that invaded our ancestors’ genomes. These segments, known as transposable elements ...